Dresden Files RPG: Your Story

Beneath the "normal" surface of the world are things and people which most of us don't want to know about, and will do our best to forget about if we ever come near them. People won't see what they don't want to see.

But that's most of us. And you-you're not most of us.

What's Your Story?

Whether you're a champion of God, changeling, vampire, werewolf, wizard, or plain "vanilla" mortal human being, this volume of The Dresden Files RPG gives you all the rules you need to build characters and tell your own stories in the Dresdenverse. Inside, you'll uncover the secrets of spellcasting, the extents of mortal and supernatural power, and the hidden occult reality of the unfamiliar city you call home.

Together with Volume Two: Our World, The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story gives you everything you need to make your own adventures in the thrilling and dangerous world of New York Times best-selling author Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series!

I'm confused. When looking at your site, Evil Hat Productions, LLC, in the section to buy this product, and Dresden Files RPG: Our World, you list both products for $10.00 on the Kindle and Nook but you double the price for a PDF. The part I am confused about is why is the PDF so much more expensive then the product for the Kindle and Nook?

The PDF is a high fidelity, gorgeous, fully laid out presentation of the game in a format that matches the print book.

The Kindle/Nook versions are stripped-down & bare-bones, lacking much of the contextual layout, artwork, and other graphical features of the PDF.

September 16, 2016 1:01 pm UTC

PUBLISHER

There is no call to lecture me about pricing, especially when you have no basis nor knowledge of the licensing agreements that may play into it. If you'd like to see some of the thinking that goes into our general pricing strategy, you can learn about part of it at my personal blog http://www.deadlyfredly.com/2016/08/value-of-content/

You are very welcome to buy the inferior, lower-priced product, or not purchase at all.

Andrew KDecember 07, 2016 5:13 pm UTC

Costs I can imagine Evil Hat incurs for these books, be they electronic or printed:

UpFront:
-Pitching and negotiating the licence
-Fully designing the game rules
-Drafting the game rules
-Full Edit for logical order
-Flavour edit, to seem a part of the Dresden world
-Layout Work (Which is a huge pain and very time consuming)
-Initial testing/response testing
-More Editing
-Final proofing
-Nope, probably a couple last-minute edits
-Negotiating with printers, distributors, and e-distributors
-Web design and self-marketing

So, even without me knowing a darn thing about the exact circumstances of Evil Hat's licencing agreements and cost factors, I can safely assume that the Dresden RPG, which appears to be very professionally produced, cost and continues to cost a fair whack of cash. I can also assume that kindle and epub versions, being tiny files without artwork, are cheaper to distribute and carry a smaller royalty price-tag. Further, many people buy the ebook versions of these texts as an additional copy, for easy reference at the gaming table, rather than as a primary purchase; or they buy them as a cheap way to get a peak at the meat and potatoes of the game before buying the full-colour version. Publishers know this, so the price might be adjusted accordingly and be artificially low.

So, while some part of me still has trouble accepting costs for intangible assets such as PDF files, I know this is silly since the same reluctance isn't applied to video games, which I have not physically bought in nearly a decade. So, when the day comes that I actually -READ- some Dresden novels, I will happily purchase these RPG books in PDF for easily half of what the printed versions cost around me...or I'll man up and just buy them in hardcover, especially since Evil Hat is so awesome they would then provide me the PDFs for free.

Or I could whine about how broke I am, and how these darn publishers just price-gouge everybody. (Just so ya know, market forces don't really let this be a thing.)

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These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

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